This paper studies the predictability of bond risk premia by means of expectations to future business conditions using … excess bond returns and that the inclusion of expected business conditions in standard predictive regressions improve … forecast performance relative to models using information derived from the current term structure or macroeconomic variables …

we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting … regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises the R-squared, and restores countercyclical variation in bond risk premia … the path of rates, our factor has predictive ability for real bond excess returns. The importance of the gap remains …